How does Acronis manages to backups data so fast?
Hello everybody :)
When I use Total Commander to copy everything from my C:\ to D:\ partition (which contains around 8 gigabytes of data) it takes around 45 minutes to complete...
But when I use "Acronis true image home 2011" to copy the same partition C:\ it gets finished in around 7 minutes!?!
HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE???
I am really interested to know what copy technique does Acronis use regarding this matter?
Best regards
Brana
Yes it does compress data, but it's compression is only somewhere around 30%.
That is to say - if I have 10Gb of data, Acronis will create somewhere around 7GB backup archive...
But I still can't understand how Acronis can write 7Gb archive file IN JUST 7 MINUTES!?
That means Acronis can copy somewhere around 1Gb per MINUTE
(or somewhere around 16,6 megabytes per SECOND?!?)
That copying speed is way too high for me to imagine...!!!
In Total Commander I can achieve the copy speed of only arround 0.4 Megabytes per second...
ON THE SAME COMPUTER!?!
Or am I missing something?
It depends on how it behaves with the file system, which can have tremendous impact on how long it takes to read/write sectors. E.g., trying copying one large file from one disk to another. Say, it takes about 50 seconds. The copy it again and then, while it's copying, start another copy task with another large file. The time won't merely double but quintuple. However, each of those copy tasks is easily interruptible and won't hog too many time slices. ATI hogs lots of time slices, isn't easily interruptible and moves bytes faster because of it.
Compression can shorten the time because it reduces the number of bytes to write but in doing so, some processing overhead is added, so it doesn't save as much time as one might expect.
I understand what You are telling here, but it's hard for me to imagine that the Hard Drive itself can achieve such a high data transfer speed!!! (But then again - it is obviously that it is possible)
And if this is so, then why can't it be utilized under an operating system such as Windows or Linux?
I am sure that there would be a plenty of users wishing to be able to copy a large amount of data under, let's say Total Commander or similar program!
BulmaSoft:
Typical maximum disk transfer rates are about 120 Megabytes per second for SSDs, 60 Megabytes per second for SATA hard disks and 20 Megabytes per second for external USB disks, so your transfer rate using TI is not out of line. But when you copy lots of small files using Windows Explorer or Total Commander, the overhead of the file system slows everything down. TI doesn't work at the file system level but rather at the sector level, so it achieves imaging speeds on the order of the disk transfer rate.